For the initial launch of our blog, we mainly leveraged our network to get the word out about our new site. Most of the traffic for our initial first post came from posting on our personal Facebook pages as well as some Facebook groups that were focused around marketing and entrepreneurship such as From Wantrapreneur to Entrepreneur (a private group for people who’ve taken the SumoMe Building $1,000 monthly business course). We also tweeted from our personal accounts to get the word out. Finally, Benji emailed an old list of his that had 164 people on it, and got a 13.5% click rate, so that also drove some traffic.

Social media. If niche forums was a great way to find people in your niche and connect with them, then social media is a great way to DRAW people into your content. Yes, once you get started, for example with your Facebook page, you can start posting content that you know your possible subscribers are going to dig! Then they'll share your stuff and your list will grow exponentially.

By being on my newsletter or autoresponder, it’s an investment of time on the part of my subscribers. It’s my job to provide valuable content to give them an ROI on that time invested. When I’m confident I’ve done that, it makes sense to say “You’ve put in time and gotten value from what I’ve given you. If you now put in time and money I’ll give you even more value.”
Integrations can help you marry data from your CRM with your email lists. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a developer to help you improve your lists. Automation and personalization are now totally accessible for the DIY marketer, and you don’t need to be using an enterprise-level tool to effectively do automation and personalization. Campaign Monitor integrates with CRMs such as Salesforce, Zapier, Sage, and many others. It also integrates with e-commerce platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, Eventbrite, and more.
Just because your email list is an online marketing tool, it doesn't mean that you only have to solicit emails online! If you have a retail location, you can collect emails when customers purchase or visit the store or other location. If you market by attending festivals or concerts, you can collect emails at those locations. Offering to raffle off a prize but requiring an email on the raffle ticket can also be an effective way to grow your email list. Of course, you'll have to dedicate the time to retyping all of the emails that you collect into your system, but it's often worth it. Don't overlook offline opportunities to grow your email list.
The vital part of this strategy is that you must provide valuable free information. You can’t just send them sales offers all the time. You must also position yourself as an expert in your niche and show the reader how you are different and better than your competitors. You can let your personality come through here, which will also set you apart from other companies in the same or similar niches.
There are tons of websites and publishers out there that cater to your audience -- and larger portions of it. Guest blogging for these websites helps you expand your contact list to this audience. When creating content as a guest blogger for another website, include a call-to-action, as well as a link in you author byline, for readers to subscribe to your site's blog or email newsletter.

Always remember to customize your messages to blogs in your market and provide them with high quality, unique articles that help their audience and readers. If you do that, you will succeed with guest blogging if you apply it consistently in your business. Every month, you should be posting at least 2-4 guest articles on other sites to see consistent results with this method.

4) Try reusing the PLR content in a different media. For example, if you purchased a PLR ebook, open up audacity and read the book. Export it and you now have an audio version of the report. Likewise, you can create a video slideshow with the content and record your screen as you present the content. Reworking the content in a new media makes your version completely unique over every other version available.
When you build a list, there are benefits that come with your subscriber base. You have the opportunity to track your emails (who received them, who opened them, etc). You can separate your list and segment it to those who want to receive certain emails or specific information. But more than anything else, you have a list of people who want to read your emails. Those can refer their friends to your business and help it grow through word of mouth.

I always pause and laugh when I see a CTA with a small, “No thanks, I don’t want to lose weight,” button underneath a prominent “Yes, sign me up!” link. It reminds me there’s a person behind the button, and, while it’s meant to be a joke, it also incentivizes me to hesitate before clicking “no, thanks”. It’s easy to click “no” when the CTA is “sign up for more emails!”, but it’s a little harder to say no to losing weight or getting richer.

Appropriately ending our discussion of opt-in forms is the exit-intent popup. As the name implies, these pop-ups show up when users display a behavior indicating their intent to leave the page. Triggers for exit-intents can be rapid mouse movement toward the top right of the screen (where the close button typically is), clicking on off-page links, set on a timer, or activated on scrolling.
Giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have imposed countless rules that limit what you can and can’t do to promote your business. If you repeat content, you’re in trouble. If you “keyword stuff,” you’re in trouble. If you backlink to shady sources, you’re in trouble. If you violate their rules, they penalize you by not displaying your content, moving you down on their results, or banning you entirely.
Subscribers get on your lists through sign up forms, but are you collecting info that can help you improve engagement? Create a new sign up form and ask for information that you can use later. For example, Topshop asks for birthday information, which can allow them to send relevant birthday offers, horoscopes, and age-related messaging. The brand also asks whether the subscriber is a student, which will allow them to send related campaigns.
If you choose a product everybody wants - like an iPad or an Amazon gift card - then you’re risking driving unqualified leads to your list. You don’t want to end up having to pay to have a bunch of unengaged people on your email list who aren’t interested in your topic and who will just unsubscribe the second you send them the next email and they haven’t won the giveaway.
To get started, find the top 5 -10 content pages on your website and create a custom Content Upgrade for each post. Once that’s done you can continue on down the list until you have a Content Upgrade for every page on your site that receives a good amount of traffic each month (note: ‘good’ is in context of your website, your traffic and your business – for some businesses it’s 100 visits per month on a content page, for others it’s 1,000).

Traffic for list building is a topic that has really frustrated me at the hands of the so-called Internet Marketing gurus. I have heard so many ideas and implemented a mishmash of them. Maybe I should go back to all my notebooks and try to condense everything that has been said and try to distill my own strategic framework out of it all. These are some of the things that stick in my mind:

Use a reactivation campaign to gauge whether non-responsive subscribers are still reading (just not clicking through or tracking open rates), or if they’ve truly decided to opt out. An example from MarketingProfs is shown here. The language you choose can play a big role in how successful these campaigns are, so be sure to split-test a few versions to maximize response.
Very interesting tutorial, thanks Carson. Can anyone tell me how we learn to set up HTML or JavaScript Code for the auto-responder and which one is better? And also how to "copy and paste to pages source code" and how to actually add a form or create a squeeze page? Or is this something that Aweber.com would cover? Any help and advice appreciated - thank you! :-) Juliet

One of the first dilemmas that you'll need to deal with when you begin to build email list is the quality versus quantity debate. Obviously, the larger your email list is, the more potential you have to generate revenue from it. However, as with most marketing activities, the quality of your leads is equally important. If you create a large email list by porting over old contacts or by buying or renting a large list, you may have a great number of email addresses. However, you may have very few email addresses that are actually leads who are interested in interacting with your product, company, or brand. That's why it's often a better idea to start slowly and build email list over time. Focus on getting the best quality leads on your email list and then let the numbers grow as your business grows. While you ultimately do need to grow the largest email marketing list possible, you also need to grow a quality list that will respond to your offers and increase your company revenue.

Tip: Align the timing of your pop-up form with the average amount of time a visitor spends on your website. Set the form to appear immediately (or with a 5-second delay) if people aren’t inclined to spend much time on your site. If visitors have a tendency to browse, consider a 20-second delay or a scroll-based trigger when someone reaches the middle or bottom of your page.

Your tip about CTA’s really hit the spot. I’ve been noticing that some of our competitors are using wordy yet highly specific buttons like ‘Get My Free Consultation Now!’ or ‘See Other Works From ____’. I was skeptic at first, but reading your logic behind it, it makes sense. I’m looking forward to implementing this on my own sites. Thank you, Brian.